While online procurement systems have existed for many years, these systems are geared towards the sourcing of physical components or goods, not the provision of intellectually oriented services.
Manufacturing and trade oriented procurement systems cannot be successfully adapted to the sourcing of intellectual services because potential suppliers are frequently judged on easily quantifiable criteria such as cost or delivery dates, whereas potential providers of intellectual services are often assessed qualitatively, typically without a consistent analysis framework.
As a result, consistent qualitative assessments of such intellectual services or competing bids to provide intellectual services are difficult to carry out on online systems or even through an exchange of online communications, resulting in the need for, among other things, phone calls between those seeking to hire and those providing intellectual services to supplement the analysis.
Such phone calls can be both difficult and inconvenient if parties are located in different international time zones. In addition, many organizations lack an organized scheme for assessing the procurement of intellectual services, in part because of a lack of a consistent assessment framework. This also creates problems of potential perceived or actual corporate governance issues.
Despite the absence of a consistent analysis framework applicable across a range of intellectual services, a consistent analysis framework can in fact be created because most requests for intellectual services, i.e. “Requests for Information (RFI)” are created because the Requester has a need or a problem that requires a resolution. A Requester also may want to know if a DR (Designated Recipient) can provide a proper response to a request for information in a timely manner by specifying a deadline in the RFI.
When a DR receives a complex RFI the DR, to prepare a proper, high quality analysis, generally needs to identify relevant facts and issues and applicable principles, legislation, or formulae. A proper, high quality response to an RFI should contain an analysis that logically leads to and supports some premise or recommendations. The analysis, on some occasions, may include an identification of additional related issues. Such an analysis framework has never been applied in a commercial procurement scenario and it is desired to have the combination of such a framework and a suitable supporting back end mechanism that will disseminate an RFI to selected DRs, receive completed responses to the RFI and provide a mechanism to evaluate these responses, and also optionally allow Requesters to encrypt their RFIs to ensure the confidentiality of the communications.